Tech Reports

ULCS-08-008

Towards Dynamic Assignment of Rights and Responsibilities to Agents

Farnaz Derakhshan, Peter McBurney and Trevor Bench-Capon

Abstract

Multi-agent computational systems are systems of multiple, interacting software entities. For many
such systems, the concepts of organization and roles provide a useful way to structure the activities of
agents and of the system, and thus provide a means to structure the design and engineering of these
systems. Accordingly, most architectures and frameworks for multi-agent systems (MASs) have some
notion of organization and of roles within organizations, and of rights and responsibilities of agents
associated to particular roles.

For many applications, the roles, rights and responsibilities of agents may change during the
running of the system. In these cases, roles and/or rights and responsibilities (R&Rs) need to be
assigned to agents dynamically – ie, at run-time. In this paper, after describing normative issues of
R&Rs, dynamic issues in MAS, the issue of dynamic assignment of R&Rs of roles to agents is
discussed. The paper presents the basis for our future work aimed at implementing a middleware
tool for such dynamic assignment in multi-agent systems.

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